Ermeneutiche digitali dieci disegni nascosti a Venezia

Ten images. Ten projects. Ten drawings. Ten mimesis. Observing with slowness, measuring architecture in time, imagining past velocities, projecting into the present, these are the operations that have delineated the visual possibilities of this work, graphics in search of a spirit ennobled by the solemnity of an elusive gaze, a turning point in the search for new places to describe and communicate. A sodality of senses and planning that measure themselves with the imaginary, to give back a piece of the city of Venice through horizons suspended, because never built upon, yet consolidated in a theoretical discourse of Design, on the possibilities of architecture. The narrative that forms the background to these ten images is set in the context of an international seminar that took place in Venice in 1978. It was a competition of ideas organised by the University Institute of Architecture of Venice that would attract designers, both nationally and internationally active, to develop hypotheses and to intervene on the specificity of the urban and architectural issues of the Cannaregio Ovest area. The plural graphic and design expressions for the reconnection of the sestiere with the rest of the city, if on the one hand they established a direct contact with the material-physical peculiarities of the place, on the other hand they revealed the dynamic interpolations of a narration by visual, symbolic, sometimes contradictory fragments. An occasion, or rather, ten graphic occasions, ten drawings that allow us to conduct a historical-critical investigation on two fronts: one, linked to the reading of the design formulation, which outlined each of the ten proposals; the other, oriented towards highlighting the architectural and urban responses through the exploratory qualities offered by the digital model, in the sense of ‘simulacrum’ of design, historical and formal values, in that graphic category that is proper to representation. The ten reconstructions recounted in this study manifest the possibilities of thinking form, declare the analytical qualities of looking, translate numerical relations into sign expressions, attempting to recognise, in the trace of the unbuilt, the evocative and functional logic of representing architecture.